“Our main argument is that when you look at a gentrifying neighborhood, you don’t need to accept that gentrification needs to continue to steamroll through the entire neighborhood, or that environmental priorities have to be put on hold to prevent further displacement”

Trina Hamilton, Assistant Professor

Geography

Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is considered one of New York City’s
fastest-developing neighborhoods. The community, a bastion of the
industrial working class, has seen an influx of artists and young
professionals in recent years. Condominium towers are going up
alongside the single-family homes that characterized the area for
much of its history.

But look closer at what’s happening in Greenpoint and a
different story also emerges, according to a new study by Winifred
Curran, associate professor of geography at DePaul University, and
Trina Hamilton, assistant professor of geography at UB.

The research describes how one group of long-time residents
teamed up with gentrifiers and external environmental activists to
push for the cleanup of Greenpoint’s Newtown Creek while
preserving the area’s industrial roots.

In this effort, gentrifiers, having been schooled in the
area’s toxic legacy by long-time residents, forged a new
political identity as environmental justice activists whose
interests were aligned with those of long-term residents. The
coalition leveraged the newcomers’ skills in areas like
writing and multimedia to achieve community goals.

The study’s findings appeared in a pair of articles
published in late 2012 in the journals Urban Studies and Local
Environment: The International Journal of Justice and
Sustainability.

“While sustainability and green urbanism have become
buzzwords in urban policy circles, too little analysis has focused
on who gets to decide what green looks like,” Curran and
Hamilton write in Local Environment. “Many visions of the
green city seem to have room only for park space, waterfront cafes
and luxury LEED-certified buildings, prompting concern that there
is no place in the ‘sustainable’ city for industrial
uses and the working class.”

The activism in Greenpoint is an attempt to battle the false
choice of cleanup and reinvestment versus decay, and to recognize
the injustice that gentrification (and previous decades of malign
neglect from the city and state) represents, the authors say.

In the case of Newtown Creek, they state: “Neighborhood
residents and business owners seem to be advocating a strategy we
call ‘just green enough’ in order to achieve
environmental remediation without environmental
gentrification.”

The researchers interviewed 24 people—including long-term
residents, gentrifiers and environmental activists—about
their effort to clean up an underground oil plume that permeates
the water of Newtown Creek and a swathe of adjacent land.

Hamilton and Curran argue that this diverse coalition, including
recent arrivals, shares the goal of achieving environmental justice
for long-term residents. The aim is to improve life for people
already living there and to preserve the neighborhood’s
industrial character—and not to make the area greener with
the hope of luring future residential development.

“Our main argument is that when you look at a gentrifying
neighborhood, you don’t need to accept that gentrification
needs to continue to steamroll through the entire neighborhood, or
that environmental priorities have to be put on hold to prevent
further displacement,” Hamilton says.

In other words, gentrifiers and long-time residents need not
always be at odds. In the case of Newtown Creek, Hamilton and
Curran say the arrival of the creative class, including highly
educated residents with professional experience in areas like
graphic design and communications, played a key role in advancing
the community’s environmental campaign.

The authors note that while the oil leaked into the environment
in the 1950s, it wasn’t until recently that Greenpoint was
able to make serious progress in the cleanup effort.

In 2008, activists partnered to form the Newtown Creek
Brownfield Opportunity Area (BOA), which is eligible to receive
state funding and technical assistance to redevelop the site. The
coalition’s vision is to clean up the area while preserving
industrial jobs. As one participant put it to Hamilton and Curran,
the activists would like to see the waterfront become a “21st
century industrial corridor.”

More progress came in 2010, when the federal government declared
Newtown Creek a Superfund site in need of serious environmental
remediation. The same year, Exxon Mobil settled lawsuits related to
the oil plume, pledging to carry out a cleanup and creating a $19.5
million Environmental Benefits Projects (EBP) fund for community
projects.

Hamilton believes that the Greenpoint case provides an important
example of how long-term residents and activists can partner with
gentrifiers to push communities’ longstanding environmental
and social concerns.

She cautions, however, that it also highlights the need for
government intervention to break the all-too-common tie between
cleanup successes and the displacement of long-term residents. She
notes that the Newtown Creek waterfront benefits from protected
industrial zoning, which has provided a critical opportunity to
create an alternative vision for a sustainable, working waterfront
in the neighborhood.